1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for providing information about a main knowledge stream and an apparatus for providing information about a main knowledge stream.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
In order to figure out an information stream or a knowledge stream related to a field of study, schemes using the numbers of times that articles have been referenced for figuring out the main stream thereof have been developed. Conventionally, a scheme for figuring out a knowledge stream of a specific field of study is achieved by searching for articles which were referenced many times. Referring to FIG. 1, conventional scheme for searching for and providing with a main knowledge stream of a specific study will be described.
FIG. 1 is a table for illustrating a scheme used for providing a main knowledge stream. For example, it is assumed that a technical field may be divided into three particular technical fields A, B and C, each of which has 2, 3, and 5 articles, respectively. If the articles in each of the particular technical fields A, B and C were referenced 4, 9, and 20 times, respectively, the average referenced numbers of times per article in each of the particular technical field was referenced are 2, 3, and 4, respectively.
The total number of the articles in all of the three particular technical fields is ten, and the total number of times that all of the articles were referenced is thirty-three. In a local point of view which considers particular technical fields, the average referenced number of times per article in the technical field is (2+3+4)/3 (the number that the sum of the average referenced numbers of times per article in each of the particular technical fields is divided by the number of the particular technical fields). On the other hand, in a global point of view which does not consider particular technical fields, the referenced number of time per article in the technical field is 33/10 (the number that the sum of numbers of times that the articles were referenced is divided by the number of the articles). Accordingly, the number of times that an article was referenced may differ depending on which particular technical field is considered, for example. That is, if a document is related to several technical fields, knowledge streams in each of the technical fields may not be figured out simply by using the number of times that articles were referenced as basis data for providing knowledge streams.
As schemes for determining a knowledge stream, a node pair projection count (NPPC) method, a search path link count (SPLC) method, and a search path node pair (SPNP) method have been discussed. However, these schemes for figuring out a main knowledge stream, in a statistical manner or quantitative information analysis manner such as summing the numbers of times that documents were referenced, have the following problems.
First, when information included in a document covers various fields, it may not be possible to identify from which technical field the document has acquired a main knowledge stream, among several technical fields, and from which document in the technical field. Therefore, for a document covering various fields, conventional schemes for figuring out a main knowledge stream may not be possible to provided accurate information about the main knowledge stream.
Since a document may relate to researches in several fields, a main knowledge stream may not be figured out only by focusing on such statistical schemes, without considering technical fields of reference documents and understanding knowledge streams in each of technical fields.
Accordingly, there is a problem in that the knowledge stream the author of a document considers may not match the knowledge stream according to a simple statistical scheme as described above.